News
We tend to think of lions as Africa’s ultimate killers, but a lone lion hunting in daylight succeeds in only about one chase in five, while packs of the endangered, large-eared African wild dog have been recorded succeeding in as many as nine out of ten
2+ hour, 41+ min ago (552+ words) The lion owns the human imagination in a way few predators ever have. It is the animal on shields and flags, the roar behind the idea of wild Africa, the...
Two Asian mantis species just got Europe's harshest invasive label — and the reason involves cannibalized native males, vanishing pollinators, and a warming climate quietly opening the door north
2+ hour, 38+ min ago (622+ words) Two large Asian praying mantis species have established breeding populations across parts of Europe. The insects are reportedly eating native pollinators,...
Scientists have found a Heliconius butterfly that barely seems to age, living several times longer than its close relatives and showing little sign of physical decline — and its biology may hold clues to why a few animals escape the usual rules of ageing
1+ day, 17+ hour ago (409+ words) A tropical butterfly genus best known for bright wing patterns and mimicry has now become interesting for a quieter reason: some of its members live much...
Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings, the only animal known to do so, forming the flat-sided pellets inside the last stretch of their intestines and stacking them on rocks and logs to mark territory in a way round droppings would simply roll away from.
1+ day, 18+ hour ago (967+ words) This is not a folk claim or a zookeeper’s exaggeration. Wombats are the only known animal in the world that produce faeces with flat sides, a fact confirmed in 2018 when a team led by Georgia Institute of Technology engineer Patricia…...
A tiny crustacean called Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through its gills, severs the blood vessels of its tongue until the organ withers away, and then latches onto the stub to serve as a functioning replacement tongue for the rest of the fish's life.
1+ day, 18+ hour ago (1289+ words) Somewhere in the warm coastal waters between the Gulf of California and Ecuador, a snapper is swimming with a crustacean in its mouth where its tongue used to be. The animal is Cymothoa exigua, an isopod barely an inch long,…...
Killer whales off the Pacific Northwest speak in distinct dialects passed down through generations, and pods that never interbreed can share the same waters while sounding as foreign to each other as speakers of two unrelated human languages.
1+ day, 19+ hour ago (1321+ words) The southern resident killer whales that surface off Washington state and British Columbia carry distinctive repertoires of clicks, whistles and pulsed calls. Researchers who have listened to them for decades can often identify which pod is nearby from the shapes…...
The oldest individual animal ever found was a clam pulled from the seabed off Iceland, and researchers only worked out it was 507 years old after they had opened it to count the rings
2+ day, 22+ hour ago (622+ words) The animal that became famous as Ming did not look like a record holder. It was an ocean quahog, Arctica islandica, a hard-shelled clam pulled from the...
Pando, a single quaking aspen in Utah, is one organism made of roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems sharing one root system across 106 acres, weighs about 6,000 tons, and may have been cloning itself for up to 14,000 years.
3+ day, 58+ min ago (1577+ words) On a ridge above Fish Lake in south-central Utah, what looks like an ordinary aspen forest is generally understood to be one enormous tree. Roughly 47,000 pale trunks rise from a shared root system, each carrying the same basic genetic identity....
Pterosaur Wings Were Probably Far More Varied Than Reconstructions Suggest
2+ week, 5+ day ago (25+ words) The one thing every pterosaur reconstruction needs is the one thing no pterosaur fossil preserves. The wing membrane, that thin sheet of skin and muscle...
A Bird's Warning Song Rewires Its Chicks' Brains Before They Even Hatch
1+ mon, 14+ hour ago (400+ words) A team led by Julia George at Clemson University set out to find the change. Mylene Mariette, then at Deakin University in Australia, played recordings of heat calls to developing embryos during the last few days before hatching, as though…...